A dear friend is visiting me this weekend. Well, not actually visiting me, but staying with me while she attends a Viennese Waltz extravaganza. She lived in DC for many, many years - actually her whole working life - so she doesn't need the grand tour of the city or to be entertained which is nice. My conundrum for this visit is that she has become a vegan. She never had any vegetarian or vegan tendencies until she visited her adult daughter a few years ago. The daughter has been vegan for a long, long time. It started as an attention getting step when she wanted to make her mother crazy but she continued long past her mother caring what she ate.
I figured I could provide vegan meals while she is here as many things are vegetable based and I can just leave off the meat course. So, the menu is: Friday night - Spaghetti Squash Primavera (excellent! I'll just leave the cheese topping off the casserole); Saturday breakfast - fruit, bagels, cereal with not-real milk); Saturday night - black beans and rice (have in the freezer from Noche Buena) with plantains and salad. Snacks are corn chips, salsa, guacamole, hummus, celery, etc.
When researching for my menus I realized that 1) many vegan/vegetarian things are "pretend" meat products, and 2) almond milk is an ecological disaster. The more I thought about the vegan movement the less I could appreciate someone adopting this life choice. I could far more, and do support efforts for humane treatment of animals but, let's face it, they are food. Animals eat animals, just try offering a lion a kale salad. And turns out chickens fed a totally vegetarian diet will peck one another to death because of lack of essential nutrients. And don't get me started on almond milk. It takes 23 gallons of water to produce a glass of almond milk! and one glass of almond milk has minimal protein so it doesn't even have good nutritional value. Just drink a glass of water and you and the earth would be better off.
